Wednesday, 25 March 2015

Hello everyone, welcome to another week on the Chocolate Baroque Challenge Blog. This week we are announcing the winner of Challenge Eight. The winner of our £15 prize to spend at Chocolate Baroque is Joan, whose card was drawn by Random.org as the overall winner. Congratulations Joan, we hope that you enjoy your prize.

You can also display our Winner's badge on your blog, details of how to obtain the badge can be found on the FAQ tab at the top of the page. Please email Lesley on lesley@chocolatebaroque.com so that she can organise your voucher.

Our Top Three this month have been chosen by the Design Team, who have as always, had a tough job choosing just three projects from all of the amazing entries that we received. The Top Three in no particular order are:

Congratulations girls, you can display the Top Three badge on your blog. Details of how to obtain the badge can be found on the FAQ tab at the top of the page. Well done to everyone who entered, and we hope that you will enter the current challenge. You can find the details here.

We have some more Design Team inspiration for you this week. First of all we have a scenic card from Claire:

Thank you so much girls for your inspirational projects. We hope that they will inspire you to get crafting and enter the challenge yourselves.

We will be back next week with more projects from the Design Team, but until then, we look forward to seeing more of your entries. If you have any questions and you cannot find the answers on the blog, please send us a private message using the contact form located at the very end of this blog post; you will see it after the comments section.

Wednesday, 18 March 2015

Hello everyone, and welcome to a brand new challenge on the Chocolate Baroque Challenge Blog. We would like to welcome our new followers this month, and to thank our regular visitors for your continued support. It means a lot to us to receive your comments, and we look forward to seeing your entries as they arrive for the challenges.

We will be announcing the winner for Challenge Eight next week, both here and on our Facebook page, so be sure to check the announcement to see if you are the winner of our prize.

As a reminder to those of you who have visited our blog before, and for anyone who is new to the blog, our challenges are monthly, based on an inspirational photo and a colour swatch. A new challenge is posted on the third Wednesday of every month and you can use any medium to create your projects; paints, inks, pencils, pens, etc., as long as you keep to the colours from the colour swatch in your project.

We are offering a monthly prize of £15 to spend on Chocolate Baroque stamps to one lucky winner, who will be selected by Random.org from all of the entrants who have used Chocolate Baroque stamps that are currently available from the website. We welcome entries incorporating other stamps, but they will not be eligible to win the prize. All entrants will have the chance to be selected as one of our Top Three and can then display our 'I made the Top Three at Chocolate Baroque' badge on their blog.

Now onto this month's challenge, which has been inspired by an original piece of artwork made by Glenda:

The challenge will close at 12.00 p.m. on Tuesday 14th April 2015, and the winner will be announced on Wednesday 22nd April 2015. Here are some inspirational projects from the Design Team for you:

Wednesday, 11 March 2015

Hello everyone, and welcome to another week on the Chocolate Baroque Challenge Blog. We hope that you have been enjoying the current challenge, and if you have not entered yet, you still have a few days left. You can add your projects to the link in this post.

We have received some fabulous entries this month, and we always enjoy reading the blog posts that accompany your entries. We would like to showcase just a few of this month's entries in our post this week.

Our first card comes from Sue, using one of our A Year of Stamping stamps:

Thank you to everyone who has entered this month so far, and we hope to see lots more entries from you before the challenge deadline next week.

We have a free download for you from Lesley this week, it is a really pretty vibrant design, useful for lots of different projects. Please do not pass the image onto others, but send them back here to collect the freebie for themselves.

To obtain your free download, please click on the image below. Once you have enlarged the image on your screen, right click the image, choose the option 'Save As', and save the image to your computer. You can now print the image onto a variety of surfaces for your crafting projects.

The Design Team have been making some projects with the download for your inspiration:

If you feel inspired to make something with one of Lesley's downloads yourself, why not upload a picture to our Facebook Page? We would love to see what you have made.

We will be back next week with another post and a brand new challenge. Don't forget, if you have any questions, and you can't find the answers on the blog, please send us a private message using the contact form located at the very end of this blog post, you will see it after the comments section.

Our challenges are monthly, based on an inspirational photo and a colour swatch. A new challenge is launched on the third Wednesday of every month and you can use any medium to create your projects; paints, inks, pencils, pens, etc., as long as you keep to the colours from the colour swatch in your project. We offer a monthly prize of £15 and the winner is drawn by Random.org from those entries that have used Chocolate Baroque stamps currently available on the website. We welcome entries from anyone however, and all entries will be considered by the DT members for a slot in the Top Three each month.

This week, we have more inspiration from the DT, Shirley and Claire have both very kindly provided a tutorial for their projects.

Sprinkle a very small amount of Brusho crystals (in separate areas) on the watercolour or mixed media paper.
Spritz with the shimmer spray and let it run. Add more crystals or spray as required to get a finish that you are happy with.
Cover with crinkled plastic wrap and let dry for approximately 15-20 minutes and remove, (note: this technique is quite effective on glossy paper, but remove the plastic wrap after 10 mintes).
Wait for background to dry.
Stamp the textile and building images with Spiced Marmalade Distress Ink at the top and bottom.
Stamp the main flower image with Deep Purple Archval Ink.
Colour the main image with pencils, leaving two of the flower centres uncoloured to show the orange background.
Add lettering using the stencil, 3D paint and palette knife to the background. Quickly wash the paint off the stencil. (Alternatively you could add lettering using Seedless Preserves Distress Ink with a blending tool).
Distress the edges with distress tool.
Colour background edges with blending tool and Chipped Sapphire Distress Ink.
Mount background onto folded purple cardstock.

Claire has created her card using Pan Pastels for a completely different finish:

Stamp the Klimt panel with Versamark onto white cardstock.
Apply the Pan Pastels using a Sofft tool and blend lightly.
Use a pencil eraser to remove any excess colour from around the image.
Trim the panel and mat onto purple card.
Repeat the steps above for the sentiment.
Layer the image and sentiment onto a white card blank using double sided tape for the image and 3D foam pads for the sentiment.

Thank you to Shirley and Claire for their inspiration this week. We will be back next week with another post and more inspiration for you. We look forward to seeing more of your entries and hope that you will join in the challenge yourselves.

You can add your entries to the Inlinkz link here. In the meantime, don't forget if you have any questions, and you cannot find the answers on the blog pages, please send us a private message using the contact form located at the very end of this blog post; you will see it after the comments section.

Current Challenge

Welcome

A very warm welcome to the Chocolate Baroque Challenge Blog. We love crafting and stamping in particular and we love to share and encourage you to have a go.

We hope that you will be inspired to get your stamps inked up, make some time to play and end up with a creation you are proud to share with us all.

Please take a look around - we have tabs at the top that give you lots of information about how our challenges work and if you have any questions at all, please use the Contact page to get in touch and one of the team will get back to you.